Are you a manager, entrepreneur, owner, employer, etc.? How do you save your time? How do you save money? How do you manage to keep the right people with you? How do you choose those that fail to keep pace? How do you attract and pick new employees? Your business needs a Refresh?

“Time Is Money!” sounds familiar and you most likely go to bed and wake up in the morning with this phrase in your head. You constantly hear this phrase because you have a business that began to irritate you and that’s why you don’t enjoy it anymore. Whether it is your business or a leadership position in a business, you will experience a time crisis at some point. Everything seems to compress and Space – Time theory you saw in the science fiction movies becomes more real than ever but you never thought that a business like yours can become a subject of science fiction.

Saving time is the number ONE priority because, as I said, by saving time you save money and make money. The money you need to run the business. Rescue operation time can be a laborious damn if you do not have the necessary tools, people, and ideas.

Losing valuable time, as a space shuttle loses air after a collision with an asteroid – to go on with the science fiction example – you hardly succeed if you succeed at all to recover and to continue your mission if you don’t know HOW and if don’t have the WHAT. Just like the famous reply: “Houston, we have a problem!”, you will have to ask for the help of those who know HOW and have WHAT they need so they can help you.

To give an example of a business that can make you lose precious time (and money) I’ll talk strictly about a personnel problem within the company, firm, business etc. Staffing issues come and go. After the period in which everything was beautiful and pink and seemed headed only for good certainly will come less pleasant times in which staff will go through changes. Whether some of them resign when you have a hard time or even when everything was normal; then there is the maternity leave or it may be necessary to hire new people for business development.

Do you have an HR department? Let them do the work. Although you don’t like what people they hire? It’s complicated to choose the right people, the workforce if those who are in HR are not really good. After all, who hired them? And when was the last time they hired someone? What if they’re out of the hand? Normal questions normal for the ones that care about their business.

Don’t you have an HR department? That’s a bummer! Now it’s obvious that only you, as a manager, entrepreneur or owner of the business can make the best choices when it comes to gathering around you the persons that will make a difference in the future and that won’t leave you in hard times. Why? Other precious time lost. You lose the time right from the start, from the moment when the first problem with employees appeared. Lost time, lost money, remember this! I’m telling you this again because you will be so preoccupied resolving the situation with the staff that you will forget how much you lose. And when you will realize that you lose, you’ll get both in panic and in the “normal” time crisis.

The result? Hiring people on “fast forward” without a careful inspection of their resumes or qualities. These are the people that can suit your business needs only by chance. Let me tell you something – this miracle never happens. 🙂

So if miracles do not happen, your business will clearly suffer from a lack of staff or you will be stuck with poor quality employees.

If I had to choose one example, company X (where I worked in a few years ago) is going through a restructuring process, recalibration of staff. They have not made the change of employees at the right time, has not reviewed them and the business began to lose ground on the market. Direct competitors are very strong. So was firm X once but because of internal changes everything was messed up and the business started to regress. Less at the beginning but what seemed to be just a momentary trend was turned into a disaster.

Therefore, they took their “heads out” and are willing to restructure because otherwise, they’ll go on a one-way road – the road to the business death. The recruitment process is quite difficult especially because the labor market in the area is quite restricted. It is really hard to find good people and match them with the available jobs but as I said before with the proper tools and with the “Know-How” in your pocket, you can come out of this kind of situations with your head up.

We will continue next time when we will find out how to save time and… MONEY.